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This extent of euphoria would make me nervous if I were an Amazon shareholder. Yes Amazon is a great company and productizing all these different parts is an e
by fauigerzigerk 10y ago
This extent of euphoria would make me nervous if I were an Amazon shareholder.
Yes Amazon is a great company and productizing all these different parts is an excellent idea. I agree that it is their most important moat.
But Amazon is astonishingly mediocre at one key task: Helping customers find, select and configure what they want.
Amazon is not a good fashion retailer. Amazon is not a good electronics retailer. Too much information is missing or incorrect, the product range isn't nearly big enough, configuration options are almost non-existent and there is zero innovation on the presentation side.
In other words, Amazon is not a good specialty store. It's actually a pretty bland supermarket when it could be so much more.
- thinkling 10y agoI was surprised that they killed off Endless[1], the dedicated shoe shopping site, rather than turning it into a subsite or skin on Amazon; I was expecting Amazon to create more category-specific UI, but very little of that has happened. Maybe the categories are too hard to define? Maybe it gets too hard to move the underlying platform forward when you've got 20 forks of the UI to maintain? [1] Though it makes sense after the acquisition of Zappos that they didn't want to have 3 shoe stores. Or does it? You'd think running a separately branded web front-end would be cheap.
- thirdsun 10y agoThat mirrors my impression as well. I like Amazon for their fast and certain next day delivery, but I only go there when I already know what I want. Research and discovery definitely happens elsewhere. Amazon is simply too cluttered, lacking curation and in-depth information. Customer reviews are useless to me as well - I prefer to gather opinions from niche forums full of enthusiasts and experts.